Horror stalwart James Herbert took the Roman Catholic Church to task in Shrine: a mute child performs miracles and, before you know it, the holy fathers are ignoring scary nuns, ghosts, and animated statues of the Virgin Mary and instead falling all over themselves to capture the media spotlight. Here the Church is less concerned with helping the poor than with recruiting new congregants to fill its empty pews. Which means the clergy are caught completely off guard when the little girl turns out to be possessed not by the Holy Spirit but by yet another ghost of yet another murdered English
...more
